The exhibition compares for the first time the artists Boris Lurie and Wolf Vostell under the sign of their common confrontation with the Shoah in Germany as well as in America after 1945.
Boris Lurie, born in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) in 1924, and Wolf Vostell, born in Leverkusen in 1932, were linked by a lifelong friendship. Lurie, the Russian Jew who grew up in Riga and experienced the horrors of the Shoah, was immediately understood by Vostell, who wanted to recreate these traumatic experiences as a German, because he himself believed in his Jewish roots and felt closely connected to the fate of the Jews. Both artists not only shared a common theme, but independently drew on the collage and montage techniques of the early avant-gardes throughout the 1950s.
They probably met during Vostell's first residency in New York in May 1963. Vostell wrote retrospectively about this encounter: "At the same time I then met Boris Lurie […]. It was all too natural that an encounter occurred because we were working on the same subject, the same mode of expression."
Despite the age difference, the two artists began their artistic production only after the end of the Second World War. Both initially worked with the means of traditional painting, and in the course of the 1950s, using the techniques of collage and assemblage, they critically engaged with Pop Art in New York (No!art movement, Lurie) and Nouveau Realism in Paris (dé-coll/age, Vostell).
Like Boris Lurie, Wolf Vostell radically rejected the art market and art as a consumer good. Since 1959, he has also focused on the confrontation with the repressed past and the persistence of violence and wars in the present.